PROVIDENCE — Governor Carcieri has appointed Warren Simmons, the director of the Annenberg Institute for School Reform at Brown University, to chair a new task force that will try to figure out how to build a successful urban school system.

Carcieri made the announcement during a speech before a group of business leaders attending the annual economic outlook breakfast, sponsored by Sullivan & Company at The Hope Club.

Carcieri underscored something that Rhode Island Education Commissioner Peter McWalters has been saying for many years: there are two Rhode Islands, the haves and the have-nots. Students from suburban and rural schools are performing as well as their middle-class peers around the country, with an average of 75 percent of elementary and middle school children reading at proficiency.

But those figures drop dramatically in urban school districts, where only 40 percent of students are reading at grade level.

“The big issue is the disparity between the urban schools and the non-urbans,” Carcieri said. “If we can’t get all of our youngsters [to graduate] with the skills they need, we’re all in big trouble.”

While there are pockets of excellence in urban school districts, the high-performing schools aren’t sharing what they know with their colleagues. According to Simmons, one of the greatest problems is that each school district exists in a vacuum: public schools aren’t talking to charter schools; city schools aren’t talking to suburban schools and innovative schools like the Metropolitan Regional Career & Technical Center aren’t sharing what they know with everyone else.

“We have to break down those boundaries,” Simmons said. “We need to create a new vision for our urban education system. In Rhode Island, we have a fractured vision and a fractured system.”

For far too long, educators have concentrated on how to fix the schools rather than look at what the entire community of teachers, parents, business and union leaders and faith-based organizations can do to help urban students catch up with their suburban peers.

“Our vision is inadequate,” Simmons said. “None of us succeeded because of what we learned in school. We had parents and communities that supported us.”

Then, Simmons told a story about his own childhood in East Harlem, New York City. Thanks to court-ordered desegregation, Simmons was bused to an affluent school on the Upper East Side. There, he learned to play the viola, and, although he was very good, he wasn’t talented enough to be accepted into a prestigious school of music in the city.

As a child, Simmons wondered why he didn’t make it. Now, he realizes that part of the reason was that his classmates grew up surrounded by music and trips to the symphony, a world of privilege that wasn’t available to a child from East Harlem.

Living in Barrington, Simmons said, doesn’t “inoculate” parents from the impact of low-performing schools on the larger society. Urban schools, he said, will never get better as long as “privileged parents gather around a certain number of schools, leaving others to fail.”

By way of illustration, Simmons pointed out what six schools in London are doing to boost achievement among poor and minority students. First, the schools are wired so teachers can take advantage of what high-performing schools elsewhere are doing right. Second, businesses and housing agencies are thinking about how they can offer students the support and the skills they need to succeed in the real world.

In 1998, Simmons succeeded small-schools guru Ted Sizer as director of the Annenberg Institute, whose mission is to search for ways to improve education for poor and minority students. The institute was founded in 1993 with $5 million from private donors. Later, a $50-million gift from the Annenberg Challenge expanded the institute’s goals, which include helping schools develop the skills they need to make broad reforms and using state assessments to shape school improvement as well as measure student progress.

lborg@projo.com